I’ve been thinking for a few years now how most of the issues we see in creative industries, including video game development, stem from the fact a lot of managers and executives think these industries can “scale” just like manufacturing does, which also explains why they are so keen in adopting AI.
And, like, I’m not saying “people in creative fields should only work at their own pace”, but more like “you can’t force 9 women to have a baby in 1 month”. That’s the absolute misconception about these fields that require “manual” labor and/or input. But these people keep going off on this idea of “I’ll throw more people in this field, which isn’t mathematically accurate and can’t easily scale and replicate things, so everything is done faster (although previous data has shown it won’t)”.
This even happens with translation, where people think having 10 translators working on 100k words in 1 week will have the same quality and result as 2 translators working on 100k words for 2 months.
It just won’t.
And to manage anything in a creative field, you have to think long-term and eat up the occasional financial loss. This is literally the reason companies like Larian and Ustwo are able to stay in the game while avoiding layoffs and other bad stuff, and they even said so themselves. Success is built upon layers of previous experience and all sorts of other factors outside people’s control, like platform visibility, marketing, launch window among other titles, and so on. I even dare to say that putting more people to work in a creative project might make it slower because that’s more tasks to assign, more people will have to learn specific styles about what they are doing, small inconsistencies will show up more because everyone is their own person and not a machine capable of perfectly copying another human being, and so on.
Some time ago I read an article about some of the myths surrounding the so-called “AI”, and it mentioned the “productivity myth”. As it explained:
The productivity myth suggests that anything we spend time on is up for automation — that any time we spend can and should be freed up for the sake of having even more time for other activities or pursuits — which can also be automated. The importance and value of thinking about our work and why we do it is waved away as a distraction. The goal of writing, this myth suggests, is filling a page rather than the process of thought that a completed page represents.
Before the age of the so-called “AI”, we would call this “content factories” (derogatory). It never stopped executives (or managing types with MBA but who never worked in a creative field) of trying to push slush in the hopes of making more profit, but it feels especially bad now as creativity is completely denied as a human skill, feeding into the idea that creative content can be produced faster, that now there’s nothing stopping them, as they don’t need to hire pesky humans to do a human job.
*sigh*
Anyway, these are fields that can’t be automated. This isn’t manufacturing, where if you want to double the production, just purchase another automated production line, hire a few more people, and call if a day. The human brain isn’t an automaton that can be replicated. If you want to make things faster, give creative people a deadline and freedom to work their own way. Throwing more people into non-technical jobs will only raise the costs (because people need a fair wage) for minimal gains (keeping production costs lower has higher chances of breaking even, and one of the largest costs is paying for labor). I mean, in the past, teams of a few dozen people were capable of launching a game every 2 to 3 years but, now, teams with hundreds of people take 5 or more years to make a game, so clearly something has gone wrong somewhere, and I don’t think it’s the lack of people doing creative work, or the capability of creating said work.
So, yeah, I wish the higher-ups would stop just throwing more people at problems or trying to automate the creative process, hoping things will get done faster this way, and start — for once — listening to those who do the actual work.
preach it chief